


When We Were Young

by juxtapose



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Aliens (the movie), Angst, F/M, POV Mulder, The X-Files Revival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-23
Updated: 2015-11-23
Packaged: 2018-05-02 23:31:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5267957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/juxtapose/pseuds/juxtapose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's different now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When We Were Young

**Author's Note:**

> I'm back with X-Files and Adele. Yikes. I would say I'm sorry, but I'm totally not.
> 
> DISCLAIMER: I don't own X Files, _Aliens_ or Adele's new album.

Maybe it’s the wine.

Scully’s soft blue eyes glisten with a smile as Mulder tops off her glass. He follows her gaze down to the sloshing burgundy liquid. When she looks up at him again, he puts the bottle down on the side table so she can’t tell his hands have started to shake as his mind takes him back to nights like this.

“You know,” she says slowly, tilting her head toward him. “I distinctly remember that you hate this movie.”

The light of the stark attempt at a warm atmosphere in the hotel room makes the red in her hair stand out, creates a ring of hazy gold around her. She is ethereal, like some half-goddess (half-, because the crease in her brow and her bell-laugh are so very human). Two decades may have scarred lines into both their faces, but Dana Scully is still as beautiful as Mulder remembers her walking into his office in 1993.

They’re watching _Aliens_ on a small flatscreen on which Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley is fighting for the essence of human life, or at least her stunt double is. And Fox Mulder is spending the night with someone other than his ghosts for the first time in a very long while.

They are on a case together--an odd resurrection of a tradition Mulder never thought he would find his way back to. And, just as if the cutting forces of silence and time had not squeezed themselves between Mulder and Scully for so long--as if nothing had changed--she is on the other side of his queen-sized bed, high heels kicked off haphazardly and a handful of mixed nuts (compliments of the hotel) held out to him in offering.

He takes a cashew. His fingers brush against hers, but he wills himself to focus on the film. “Ah, Scully. That’s where you’re wrong. _Alien_ was a travesty. But I’m a sucker for a good sequel.”

Mulder takes a sip from his own glass of wine. It doesn’t quite taste like anything to him. Ever since she’d left his senses had dulled a bit. The only memories he could really latch onto were the smell of her skin, the touch of her hand slipping into his; the sight of her throwing her head back in uncontrollable giggles; the sound of his name in her rasped whisper when he was inside her--

Scully snorts and cuts off his stream of thought. “And then you dragged me to see the fourth one when it came out, which--Mulder, even you’ve got to admit. The science, or should I say lack thereof, is appalling.”

“Okay, look,” Mulder argues, a grin unable to keep itself from tugging at his expression, "This is the good one. I promise. There’s a big battle and everything. Y’know. Humans fighting the good fight against the alien baddies.”

“But you know that’s not what it’s like,” she says, tone suddenly changing from teasing to a soft severity. “So black-and-white.” Scully sighs, and Mulder feels his body instinctively sag in time with her exhale. “Good guys win and survive, bad guys go down in dust...you and I know better than anyone that it doesn’t work that way.”

“Sometimes I wish it did,” replies Mulder. They have not spoken this frankly in years about their shared haunted past. He wonders for a moment if he should tread carefully--could they really be like this again? So open? Is it so easy?

Taking another gulp of wine, he lets an admission fall between the slashing action scenes blaring onscreen nonetheless: “I hated the first movie because it came out so soon after Samantha’s disappearance.” He almost laughs. "I mean, six years after. But six years is fresh when you're a kid."

He isn’t surprised when she says, “I know.” She reaches over and brushes her fingers against his arm. The onset of goosebumps scatter across the flesh below the sleeve of his t-shirt. Her hand is in her lap again before he can register the feeling. _It’s the wine_ , he tells himself again.

“I just.” God. Her eyes, he can feel them, burning into him. She watches him intently and utters, without a trace of shyness, “I’ve missed this.”

Mulder’s stomach drops. He forces a shrug and zones in on the film’s terrible special effects. “Tacky striped curtains and overpriced room service? Me too. Nothing like it.”

“Shut up, Mulder. You know what I mean.”

Daring to steal a side-glance, he finds her engrossed in the movie again--he’s unsure if she’s forcing herself to watch the screen instead of the person next to her, like he’s been trying to do for over an hour--and takes the opportunity to study every detail of her. Mulder absorbs each one into his consciousness--the slight bump just before the tip of her nose, the pink wine-flushed cheeks; slightly parted, wet lips, long fingers holding a glass printed with the hotel name which Mulder couldn’t remember if his life depended on it. Those little details have never mattered to him.

And yet he could tell you what X-File they were pursuing when Scully first reached out to hold his hand, or the earrings she was wearing the first time he knew he was completely in love with her. His journey with the X-Files had been his journey with her. There was no way to differentiate the two. Perhaps that had always been the problem.

In everything she is, he also sees what she was. He remembers the fire with which she first walked into his life, and that no matter how many times he or anyone threatened to extinguish it, even when it flickered, it remained. Guiding Mulder out of the dark. At least, for a time.

She’s smiling a bit. Perhaps something cheesie happened onscreen, or the strange deja vu of the moment is hitting her as hard as it’s hitting him. He blinks slowly, and in the flicker of pitch black he sees across the bed from him a Scully who hasn’t known pain quite yet--or not so much of it in bulk. He sees Scully at his side, laughing at something ridiculous he’s said in the middle of a debrief with Skinner. He sees them both sitting on his couch with a couple of beers. He sees her asleep with her head on his shoulder. He sees himself cradling her in his arms, and pulling her to him when nothing else could hold him to the earth, and sobbing silently at her hospital bedside. There were so many versions of themselves, stages they’d seen each other through. Had either of them ever thought they would end up here?

He longs to preserve this moment--take a photograph, put it up on a wall in his mind next to his very first glimpses of her. Young, strong, completely brilliant Dana Katherine Scully, introducing herself stoically to the lonely man in the basement who would never be the same afterward.

Scully is looking at him again, brows quirked in curiosity. “What?” she asks.

He asks, before he can stop himself: “Why did you come over tonight, Scully?”

“What?” she repeats. He’s caught her off-guard, he can tell. But he can’t stop now.

“We got separate rooms--of course, and. And then you show up with a bottle of wine and.” He gestures to the space between them, which is considerably less than the miles and miles that have stood as of late. There is an uncomfortable silence between them which seems to linger for hours until finally, with a small laugh intended, Mulder thinks, to be much lighter than it sounded, Scully says:

“It’s completely silly, actually. I thought...” She shakes her head, leaning back against the headboard and avoiding his gaze once again. “It’s. It’s nostalgic, isn’t it? Don’t you feel that? It’s been nearly a decade and we’re back to running around chasing monsters in the dark. I just thought...maybe...it would feel the same.”

They had moved closer to each other without noticing, wine discarded on respective bedside tables. Her face is mere inches from his. He feels sick and elated all at once.

“Does it?” he chokes out as calmly as his voice will let him. “Feel the same, I mean.”

Her blues are still glossy, but with something more than alcohol this time around. She lifts a hand to his face, and he leans into the touch. “The second I first saw you, Mulder,” she whispered, “I knew I would follow you anywhere. It seemed so...natural. Simple, back then. Didn’t it?”

She doesn’t say it like a declaration, but rather as part of some slow funeral dirge An _in memoriam_ for something lost.

Mulder asserts, to fill the painful quiet between their voices: “It’s different now.”

“Yeah.” A tear makes a ragged, wet line down the side of her face, and before he can reach to brush it away, she is standing up and putting on her shoes as if jolted away by some force he could not see or feel himself. “Yeah, it is.”

“Scully.” Everything around him slows to a hazy halt. Mulder can’t ascertain if he actually said her name to her back as she walked away, or if he only imagined it. He wants to say, I’ve missed this too. Or, I love you. God, I love you, I love you--

But she is already in the open doorway. She half turns to him and mutters, voice shaking, “Goodnight, Mulder.”

Mulder says nothing. The sound of the door shutting behind Scully should jolt him into movement again, but it doesn’t.

He closes his eyes.

Yes. It was the wine.

The film’s ending credits roll at two in the morning, but the light in Mulder’s room blares long after. He lies under bleachy, unfamiliar covers, and does not sleep.

 

_Let me photograph you in this light_  
_In case it is the last time that we might_  
_be exactly like we were before we realized_  
_we were sad of getting old, it made us restless._  
_It was just like a movie. It was just like a song_  
_when we were young.  
\- Adele, "When We Were Young"_


End file.
